Experimenting with other game development software

 

Obviously the majority of the work on Adventures in Soliverance has been done in Twine, to make use of the narrative qualities of the game and the promotion of ideas around dialogue and conversation with others and how this could be reflected in players day to day lives. But these sorts of games can also be produced in other game engines such as Unreal Engine with added bonuses that can be implemented to improve immersion but also possibly have affects that could deter from the end goal.

With the above practice in UE (a completely new software to me) we were able to fix the player and camera in place and have a plane appear before them similar to the cells within the screens of Twine, attaching commands to certain buttons on these planes that the player interacts with through the cursor to make the same choices as in Twine.

The advantages of using this software even for a text-based game allows for additional effects to engage other senses such as sound to evoke an atmosphere (think ambient bar sounds whilst the player is in the tavern) or more visual elements or animations, the title screen would be a good place to show this off and invite the player into this game or have the lore dump at the beginning scroll up like the Star Wars films to evoke this sense of history to the world they are entering.

Character images could be added next to their speech to allow for a better understanding of who's saying what, especially later on in the game when all party members are together and it's not just one-on-one conversations like that with the innkeeper. It would also allow me to develop illustrative works for the game to tie back into my own background and the research on guest lectures from the DE4401 and DE4402 modules which led to me incorporating the use of a sketchbook again as you can see below.

Images from sketchbook work on developing the lizardfolk cleric, in no particular order.

Whilst all these added visuals can definitely increase immersion and engagement from the player, it's the same debate about digital vs traditional with all games. What the function and goals of the game are should determine the format based on how effective at successfully accomplishing this function the format is. A fully realised digital game where the player has a first-person perspective and travels this world requires less description and invites more curiosity from the player to explore and thus this interaction crafts more engagement however, this limits accessibility to a wider audience based on technology. Relating to the use of disposable cameras by Dr Gary Bratchford during his research as opposed to top-of-the-range digital cameras because it would allow for a wider range of possible participants who could just point and click - the point wasn't to have beautiful images high definition images taken but for the experience to open them up to conversation about where they lived. Here a traditional format could be effective if we take for instance formatting this conversation-based game as a stand-alone campaign book for a game system such as D&D where all participants need is the book and some dice there is more outreach available. Pair this with a desire to produce a game with a pro-social benefit and a wider audience could have a larger social impact and benefit.